Walker's war on workers goes nationwide.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: COMMENT - Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

"The labor organizations of the country are to be smashed. The decree has been entered. The orders have been issued." So wrote Fighting Bob La Follette in this magazine in December 1920.

"The drive is on," La Follette continued: Corporations "representing capital are mobilizing for a war of extermination on all labor organizations in the United States."

As Scott Walker and his Republican allies rammed through legislation making Wisconsin the twenty-fifth right-to-work state in America, La Follette's words could not be more up-to-date.

"The object," La Follette wrote, "is twofold. First of all, organized capital would destroy organized labor because of its growing political power." Second, "Organized capital would destroy organized labor in order to deprive the wage earner of the collective bargaining strength which he derives from his organization."

Attacking unions destroys progressives' organizing base. For a vivid example, see the recent right-to-work protests outside the Capitol building in Madison. A few thousand protesters gathered--a far cry from the tens of thousands, led by public-school teachers, who marched in the 2011 uprising against Walker's Act 10. Now Act 10 has ended public employees' collective bargaining rights. Teachers can't get the day off.

"Most of our members can't take a personal day now to stand up for their partners in labor, because it's a one-sided situation in our schools," says Christina Brey of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC).

"Even for hearings on budgets, in the past, educators could have a union day or a personal day to testify," says Brey. "Now they are doubly removed from the process. They are no longer at the bargaining table, and they can't get to Madison to testify. This was the plan all along."

That brings us to La Follette's second point: without collective bargaining, workers can't leverage their power to improve wages and working conditions. That's good for fattening profits for the top 1 percent. But it pulls down everyone else. In right-to-work states, the Economic Policy Institute reports, average wages for both union and nonunion households are considerably lower than in states that don't have right-to-work laws. ("Right to work" means all workers are entitled to union benefits but don't have to pay union dues--depleting union resources, reducing union effectiveness, and setting up a downward spiral that leads, ultimately, to labor's collapse.)

As Sam Wilcox, a retired...